#Don't mind me as I wordvomit

[phoenix-flamed]

Alright, going to attempt putting together my thoughts so far on some things. It's going to involve spoilers, so I'll tl;dr it first by saying that this is about Rosarian society and political choices.

According to various NPCs throughout Rosaria in the game, Archduke Elwin was considered to be a benevolent ruler, and those born or living in the Grand Duchy of Rosaria -- especially Rosalith -- were quite fortunate. In the flashback segment at the beginning of the game, he is seen to be friendly, warm, caring, and is loved by many, if not most, of his people. Even through Clive, both at the beginning and as the game progresses, we can see the influence Elwin had upon his sons and get a gist of how they were raised -- at least on his part.

However, as much as I'd love to sit here and sing praises about my favorite character, that isn't really the purpose of this post.

Elwin may have been a good man, he may have been loved by many, he may have had good intentions and wanted what was best for his people. But he is still a product of not just Rosarian politics, but the societal norms of Valisthea as a whole.

He treats the Bearers of Rosaria well, or at least better than other nations treat theirs -- but he nonetheless still owns Bearers and allows the owning of Bearers within Rosarian territory. Just because he treats them with dignity and as human beings doesn't change the fact that he perpetuates the cycle of slavery, and you do find out in Eastpool that any Bearers that lost their masters were handed over to the authorities for reassignment to a new master.

When it comes to the Northern Territories, it's said that Elwin was the one responsible for bringing them to heel and ending their rebelliousness. How did he do this? He presumably invaded their region. His goal may have been to garner peace, particularly for Rosaria(by quelling the threat that the Northern Territories posed), but his choice of action to ensure peace -- to ensure that the Northern Territories were on their best behaviour -- was to take their princess, Jill, as a political hostage and bargaining chip against her father, the king. In exchange for the Northern Territories submitting to Rosarian demand, Jill would be kept safe in Rosalith.

Yes, it's implied that he did indeed ensure that Jill was treated well, even going so far as bringing her in as a ward of House Rosfield and having her raised alongside his two sons. He presumably treated her with dignity, rather than as a prisoner -- but she was still a prisoner, regardless. One can argue that he was doing what he believed was best for Rosaria as its ruler, and I'll not disagree with that; but it doesn't change that he forcibly took Jill from her homeland, from her real family, to use her against her own father as a means of forcing him to submit. Not to mention that it's not even touching on the fact that by giving Jill a similar upbringing to Clive and Joshua, he was making sure that Jill would be immersed in Rosarian society and politics(as well as forming a personal connection with Rosarian people), therefore potentially instilling within her a bias towards Rosaria.

And then there's the fact that Elwin was willing to take his ten-year old son to war. Yes, Joshua is the bearer of Phoenix, and it's the Dominant of Phoenix's duty to not only go to war alongside the Rosarian army, but to be Rosaria's trump card/most powerful weapon in defense of their nation. But he's still only ten years old.

Elwin had a choice: to say to hells with tradition and find another way, another means of defending Rosaria; or to go ahead and adhere to their family's long-standing tradition and take Joshua to Phoenix Gate. He chose the latter. No, he didn't seem to like or want to choose that, but at the end of the day he did choose it. Even with the assurances that he and Clive would protect and guide Joshua, it's still, once again, putting a ten-year old on the front lines of war. It's a cruel and heavy burden to place upon one so young, regardless of the Eikon that they are bonded to.

All of this is to say that Elwin may have been a good man, and treated people -- Bearers included -- better than many others did, but he was by no means perfect, and he perpetuated many of the societal norms that in turn perpetuate elements such as the subjugation of people born as Bearers, the usage of Dominants as weapons of war(even if it is dressed up in prettier terms and appearances in the case of House Rosfield and Rosaria), and unintentionally lends a hand in keeping Valisthea locked in a cycle of war between nations(even if it is a byproduct of the need for survival).

I think I was going to add more, but I lost my train of thought while writing this all out. Oops.

It's people like Cid, for example, who want to break away from all of this, to put an end to these cycles and generational conditioning to accept the status quo, especially as far as Bearers are concerned. And though I'm not finished with the game yet, I'm going to assume that Clive and Jill join him on that, not only to dismantle their society's inherent flaws, but also on a greater level to break the chains of fate when it comes to the Dominants as well.

[bunnyyyuu]

ftm!megumi is so dear to me……. <3 he’s always trying to act tough and annoyed until you’re knuckles deep in his pussy and suddenly all the glares and mean comments r gone!!!! jst making little circles in his clit is enough for him to get glassy eyed n hazy i love him

includes: gn! reader, aged up! ftm megumi, overstim (kinda), anon spittin facts, not proofread wordvomit oops

megumi can be kind of a dick if you let him. thankfully, you don't let him .

his normally disinterested eyes are blown wide open during the middle of you two making out when you cup his cunt through his pant. he pulls back to stare at you and that stupid, evil smile quirking up your lips. he doesn't have anything to say, though; no scoffs, no eyerolls, no muttered digs at you.

you're tugging down his pants in record time. he gets all shy and flustered—much unlike his usual act. pressing his legs together to keep the way you can see his dripping cunny through his boxers, pulling the collar of his shirt over his reddened face, his other hand awkwardly hovering around you in uncertainty of where or how to touch you. how adorable, really.

you have to practically force his knees apart, giving him an eyeroll when he lets out an almost silent whine of embarrassment. your hand finds his puffy clit through the dampened layer of cotton and you swear his eyes gloss over. the tight figure eights you swirl over the sensitive nub already have his brain leaking out of his pussy.

"'gumi, 'm barely even doing anythin'," you giggle. laughing in his face at his most vulnerable was a pretty low blow, but the way your fingers lazily work his throbbing clit registers him too stupid to care.

he gives a half-hearted shrug, your words not even really affecting his state.

it's not long until you're slipping your hand under the waistband of his boxers and gently teasing his entrance with two fingers. he's clenching around nothing, so much slick arousal coating him it's like a waterslide. he mumbles out your name with a half-real half-fake annoyance in attempt to get you to just fuck him already!

megumi's impatient, yes, but he can't deny how much he loves when you tease him. he's so sensitive, fragile even, that even your featherlight, ghostly touches quickly get him to teeter on the edge of climax. he actually doesn't mind—just don't listen to anything he days.

"please..." he whispers, head rolled back and eyes fluttered shut.

you want to tease the boy longer, want to get him so close then stop abruptly, want to make him into a pitiful, writhing mess. but, alas, you are weak and he is so, so pretty. maybe next time (because there's always a next time with megumi. he's a feind for you) you'll wreck him for real.

he's moaning and gasping out your name like he's choking on the syllables when your fingers sink into his sopping pussy. he feels like he might die or cum right then and there—maybe both.

his hips are bucking against your hand instantly, not giving you any time to set a slow pace, unlike the sloppy desperate rolling of his hips. his clit bumps your palm with each thrust against it, his blue eyes so far back in his skull he can see his brain with 20/20 vision.

"megs, calm down," you grumble, digging the fingers into of your free hand into his thigh, "lemme do it..."

he's not one to get this needy, but, god, the way your fingers fit inside his velvety walls is all too perfect. he can't resist humping your hand like a bitch in heat. he just shakes his head weakly.

"at least look at me," you say with a small pout on your face.

and, when he does, your heart swells.

his eyes are wide open and glassy, tears forming on his waterline. his indigo irises look lighter than normal, glittering with white swirling highlights. his eyebrows are knitted together above them. his lips are parted and swollen from how you attacked them earlier as he pants and whimpers, the bottom one quivering in shaky breaths. you're the only one who sees him like this, so weak, so eager.

on one hand, no one else deserves to see him like this. on the other, he's just so beautiful you want everyone to see him and know it (and know that he's all yours).

it takes only a few minutes of him grinding on your fingers as if it were the only thing he knew how to do before he's painting your hand and the inside of the boxers he'd never bothered to peel off with his squirt. it's dirty and would ruin the moment if he wasn't so utterly lost in it. his hole squeezes you so tight it feels like your fingers might get cut off while he gushes buckets around them.

you aid him in riding out his blissful high by gently curling your fingers inside him, eliciting the most beautiful sounds of pleasure from his lips. he hides his face into your neck.

he's mumbling some apology for making a mess or being so needy against your skin but it doesn't matter one bit.

[yukisdomain]

Hi! This is not jujutsu kaisen related but I wrote a little something. I've come up with these two characters a long time ago, like at the end of 2020. I don't know why I haven't written anything about them by now, but inspiration suddenly hit me so here's a silly little snippet. It's mostly a wordvomit, esp the first two paragraphs. But if you do end up liking them for whatever reason, please let me know and please share this post.

Mind you, this was written as a joke.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

In a small town, somewhere in the greener part of Europe, lived together a phantom and a vampire – or the prince and his knight, if you wished to call them that, as the prince usually insisted. Or the phantom and the prince, given the prince was holding onto his long gone title oh so stubbornly. Meanwhile, his companion of over three hundred years refused to acknowledge his highness’ delusion of being in his service.

It was the other way around, really. The phantom – the knight and the self-appointed babysitter of the aforementioned vampire, pardon me, prince, was the owner of the most successful coffee shop and library in town, all the while keeping the lazy, mischievous diva as his employee.

It will get better. The phantom had a habit of assuring himself while simultaneously holding back the urge to exorcise the little demon out of his life. He’s young, it’s just a phase he’ll grow out of, he repeated, each time with increasing exasperation. Not even he believed in this mantra anymore, wondering if he had made a mistake of rescuing the brat all those centuries ago. With a resigned look, he observed a bush of dark red hair disappearing behind the counter to enjoy a few stolen cupcakes.

[ohyoru]

Hey im not good with words or english, but its ok to feel burnt out or tired. Youre not obligated to provide anything to us. You are an author who writes for free. Maybe to have fun maybe to express yourself. You have your own life and thats a good thing. I havent been playing genshin in a while because theres so much work i need to do there like building characters. I havent watched link click s2 because i cant bring myself to sit down for that long. Im sure everyone has something like this happening to them and i just remind myself that it doesnt matter that much. Post unfinished things, make your character builds crap, dont finish a book youve started it doesntmatter. Its about having fun. Its about forgetting your problems(at least for me) or its about spending time with your online friends. Taking a break is necessary. Spending time for yourself is necessary. Taking care of yourself is necessary. I hope i could get my message across. I cant even take my own advice seriously as im too scared to post this without anon but i hope i was able to make you feel better somehow. I also want to say i really love your works even if i dont know who the person you’re writing about is. Ive been following your works for a while and i dont regret it one bit. I would be pretty sad if you were to stop writing for certain people but if it makes you feel happy then i dont mind and im sure others wouldn’t mind it as well. Youre free to do whatever you want ( as long as youre not intruding on other peoples freedom obviously) thank you for reading my wordvomit written in an attempt to comfort you.

dearie anon,

to have you in my inbox is already a blessing enough for me. thank you so much for taking the time of your day to cheer me up, you have no idea how much this means to me (brb crying i dont deserve you sob)

first of all, your message got across. i'm not sure about your english being not good part, but really, your message resonates with me on a level deeper than language can ever explain, truly.

i appreciate your kind reminder that i shouldn't feel obliged to write for anyone. i honestly feel like it's eating me out because i put myself in the equation as well. i had been a writer before, back when tokyo revengers (anime) was still in its first season since i'm more of a manga reader. if you were in that era, you might came across my work. alas, things happened. what used to be good memories (including writing) turned into very hurtful ones and i stopped doing what i love because they're causing me so much pain. nonetheless, i still slowly died inside. it took me a while to be at peace with my past and understand that writing is what makes me the person i am. so i'm determined to start again and keep it up. but when life gets in the way and hold me back from writing (again), it depresses me. (including not playing genshin). honestly, i'm feeling lonely. what and who i used to know and love seemed to only exist in the past. people moved on, topics became irrelevant, relationship broke. which i don't blame, but it still makes me cry once in a while.

sorry for the traumadump uh- i feel like i should explain myself a little. i hope that didn't scare you too much. but anyway, you're right! i should do whatever i want. maybe i need to reframe my perspective. i love that you mention about reading book thingy because i have the same issue and yes, i'm a reader through and through. but it's been so long since i read.. the irony. maybe all i need to do is start. and love myself a bit more to stop torturing myself with unnecessary thoughts..

you know what anon? i love the past me. i dont remember exactly what i love about her, but she used to be so at peace. i'm trying to find my way back to her, and i think you're helping me set my way there, so thank you. i dont know about your problems, but if you're willing to share, i'm more than happy to listen. don't forget to take care of yourself too okay? i hope your days ahead are the loveliest yet!

also, thank you for appreciating my works! when i started writing again, i told myself and whoever that's willing to take the time of their day to consume my content that i don't need anyone's attention or approval (shadowban be damned. if it happens, it happens). i did it solely for myself. but god knows how much your kind words and others' fill up the spaces in my heart.

i'm not going to ask anything from my works. your support is something i could never repay, but i'll always appreciate it from the bottom of my heart.

(btw yes, you did send this on anon hehe i got a hunch on who you might be but if you prefer to keep it a secret, then rest assured, your secret is safe with me!)

[oodlesofoddnoodles]

i've been convinced im neurodivergent for a while now, but unable to get a diagnosis. When asking about adhd/autism diagnosis my parents basically told me it was too much work, i don't need one anyway (because it's not affecting me much).

My mom is a special educator, so she might be trying to protect me. My brother is diagnosed on the spectrum, so maybe she doesn't want another "different" kid, idk

Also, i do call myself nerodivergent, dispite only having a depression diagnosis. am i wrong to put my self in a category because of how i see myself, with out having factual evidence?

i'm not trying to hurt anyone, i just feel like that lable fits me. And i want to know if that's wrong.

Thanks

i think that if you haven’t done research on AuDhd then a little bit but also not really, the thing abt being neurodivergent is that its a very very broad thing, it doesnt just include autism and adhd, dont quote me on this but im pretty sure it just means having any sort of neural difference/disorder so i wouldnt sweat it.

also keep in mind that as long as u do your research (as in looking up the diagnosis criteria, reading MEDICAL papers about the condition from trusted sources (webmd, mayo clinic, most .org/.edu sites really, just for the love of everything please do not use tiktok)) self diagnoses is a totally valid option because i was in almost the exact same boat as you for most of my life, i was self diagnosed until like a year or two ago when i could finally go to a doctor, and even if you never go to a doctor you still are valid!! (sorry for wordvomit im walking and typing atm)

[honestlyvan]

I think I get what you mean about the weird found family stuff. I also don't really love shipping stuff, but, at least in the last couple of years, I find people get real weird about stuff like "oh he's the found family dad" sort of thing. It's hard to describe why it weirds me out, but I think it's that compulsion to give the characters "roles" in the found family stuff, where when I think of irl friends who are as close to me as family, I don't think of them as like a "sibling", they're just in my mind categorized under "family".

Of course this isn't even mentioning the weird sex negative stuff. Sometimes I want characters to have freaky weird sex stuff in their lives! Unsanitized. People into genfic can be weird about that stuff.

Yeah like for me it was the worst during the height of XC2's popularity and the absolute wealth of raging about the anime fanservice game having anime fanservice in it and the desperate urge to Divest From The Queer Horny that came with it. I don't know if the majority of the people perpetuating the moral panic eventually realised they were just useful idiots and the Killing The God That Supplanted Reality franchise was the place to get into endless unnecessary tailspins about sexual purity or not but it definitely put me off on quite a permanent basis in trying to do anything that deals with eroticism in this franchise.

It was all very prescriptivist, it was all very twee, it was all trying so hard to be cuddly and nonthreatening and safe, and it just got so uncomfortable when people were bringing all their deeply sexual baggage into the conversation over a story that, as horny as it was in places, just completely lacked any sort of genuine eroticism to me. The very few things that were hot to me that I was interested in exploring were completely ignored by-and-large, disinteresting to anyone but me, specifically. And I just couldn't get a conversational foothold about them with anyone, so I gave up.

So I kinda have this same problem with XC3 atm where I actually do find some things in it really damn hot and I am embracing the eroticism and then.... I just fail to find people with similar interests so I have no good fic to read and nobody to really talk to about it. (I've dragged two people into XC3 with me to have someone to wordvomit about the OTP to). The overt hostility against sex isn't as present, in my experience, but even if people didn't titter around the sexual aspects of the story as much.... IDK man I am tired and I am not a teenager anymore at this point themes of self-discovery and adolescence and normative pairbonding just don't do shit for me. None of it is queer and weird enough, nobody here is that attractive to me anyway, I'd much rather read gen, but then the gen is also kinda just. Like that lol.

And I know I'm probably biased, I definitely read less Xenofic than I'd like to because I look at how stuff is tagged and the summary and go "is it worth the disappointment" when there's probably good writing being done out there and I'm not giving it a chance b/c I'm fucking bitter. Like it's entirely possible that just like XC1 and XC2 didn't really have a ton of overlap in the fandom, XC2 and XC3 don't also and the things I'm really put off by the hardest are not even a thing in the fandom zeitgeist anymore.

But like man. IDK. The things I want to do with this story and the things people are doing with this story are just... really divergent. This has always been a franchise where I like the worldbuilding more than I like the characters, and then I will have like the one or two characters that I absolutely 100% am completely bananas about and they never get written in ways that I would enjoy reading.

[sztefa001]

SDFKJHSDAF YES they could ttly be stuck up nobles but also how about idk they're adventurers as well. 'Cuz lemme be honest, I can't see someone like Wheeljack in a uniform like this xD

I mean I could ttly see OP in such outfit, he'd look great I think ;w;

Also my wall of tags became too big and so imma just paste them here:

Idk how relevant this is to the pirate au but I think it could work out:

Whatever ideas I come up with with Alpine on discord most of them end up like... "and the autobots saw the senate (or whoever rules their side idk, all the info I have is from osmosis I haven't watched/read a thing) was evil and so they helped the decepticons defeat it and together they ended the war. Working to keep up the peace was not easy, a real road with ups and some serious downs but eventually they managed to acheve it and lived happily ever after."

Generally we like to imagine that sure 'cons are war criminals and all that but also that they're not all that evil and were just opressed and rebelled and- you get what I mean.

And for me this is a real cool concept to explore. Because imagine OP. He wants peace. He wants war to end. He doesn't want to kill or imprison others. What if he starts doubting his boss / the senate / whatever? What if his doubts get confirmed when he finds something proving that it's really his side that made some fucked up things happen like the bombing of Vos? He'd question this a lot I think. But it can't be true, can it? He's on the good side, he's the good guy! But what if 'con leaders are caught and aboout to be straight up executed without a trial? I think even OP couldn't allow that, no matter how much he believes his side is right. Maybe he goes "You know what, they may be bad but you're no better." Me and Alps like to think OP and squad helps the 'cons and together they defeat the evil senate in an epic battle where both sides are helping each other and cooperating.

Now I think it would translate onto the Pirate AU quite well with the senate being the stuck up nobles pulling all the strings, OP and squad being the Navy soldiers mixed up with well-fighting peeps and adventurers who support the cause and finally 'cons being the pirates who fuck the system on a daily basis.

We have the serious lore, let's now spice the things up with some funsies. Imagine searching for various treasures and magical artifacts. Just like in the original there's a hunt for energon and whatever powerful things. And in the Pirate AU we could have like... many islands with those treasures hidden and-

Great, now my mind made up a whole cartoon that has both serious stuff and makes you cry but is also funny af and makes you cry. Guys help, how do I upload daydreams on here.

Help

I put on some shanties to listen to while trying to draw pirate KO but the shanties are so good and fun I instead started daydreaming about the crew having fun on the deck and singing and dancing and I can't focus on drawing for shi-

[theunfairfolk]

I just finished reading your post about the fae language. That is so interesting to me. Like, the idea that the fae speak in a way that specifically and unquestionably references definite concepts. The thing is that there is no way of describing something in human languages that can ever really define something entirely. There is always some ambiguity in the words we use, and even our base perception of reality itself.

It's like we are somehow cut off from seeing the world around us "definitionally" (i guess) the way fae somehow do. Our experience of life itself is fundamentally different because we are only able to interact with it using these models and concepts and definitions we form in our minds that function more like blunt tools. They are flimsy and faulty and only are able to miraculously work at all because they have to for us to function as living beings at all. But fae are easily able to peirce throigh that veil of reality we are always held back by, because they don't really have that barrier to begin with, unlike us.

We are sort of alien to fae in the way we can survive and function at all when we are so cut off from reality like that.

Have I understood it right?

I might very gone in a ramble somewhere in there that sounded like I was trying to mansplain your own concept back to you, but I'm just excited by these concepts, and trying to put them into my own words, so I'm sorr-.... wait, I mean,

I would regret it if it does seem like that, haha

ah but DOES it reference Absolute Concepts or is that just Lincoln’s understanding of it? :3 your interpretation is fascinating and please ramble away, i have adhd i love to rotate the concept and wordvomit about it! and see others doing the same!

the actual driving force behind the concept i presented is idealism; the philosophy that everything is consciousness (put verrry simplistically lmao). the fae exist as one facet of that consciousness, still tethered together in a sort of magical hive-mind lite. the “language” they use conveys things errr somewhat telepathically, i suppose. they are— to borrow another anon’s phrasing, sharing “photographs” of THEIR (collective) perception of reality. no mundane creatures can do this, so many are limited in communication. humans, instead of sticking to grunts and growls, INVENTED A WHOLE FORM OF COMMUNICATION WITH WILDLY VARYING RULES AND RESULTS. this BOGGLES THE FAE’S MINDS.

it’s like finding out dolphins and stuff actually evolved to be land animals before 360 degree nope-ing and evolving back into the sea but keeping their lungs for funsies. humans are envied for their ability to create, and language is one of their greatest creations.

[mzyraj]

I've been on twitter predominantly for FF14 memes and fanart but the algorithm has drawn me into politics and current events and I have thoughts but I'm sick of twitter so I'm gonna wordvomit here:

All these people talking bs about Meghan Markle (but definitely totally not racist!) 'she's a liar' 'I don't like her attitude', as though they've ever spoken to her or know more than the media presents and misrepresents.

Somebody was claiming with a source that the call was coming from within the palace because of jealousy over Harry and Meghan's initial popularity, which I can believe as reputedly Charles was jealous of Diana's popularity when they were married and deliberately did her down trying to elevate himself, which is ridiculously stupid but that's emotionally stunted royals for you.

And I really wonder. Because I get the feeling (and it's basically confirmed by the documentary Harry did with Oprah) that the royal system ('the Firm' as it's sometimes called) is just unhealthy and toxic as fuck. And so Harry grew up with that, not really knowing different...

It's just that thing where somebody grows up in a shitty/abusive family and then they meet somebody well adjusted (or at least moreso) who treats them right, and it does change them in a way. They get the confidence to speak their mind, to trust their own judgement, to stand their ground in the face of the shitty authority figure. But since they then don't want to blame the kid or do any introspection about how shitty they themselves are, it's her. She ruined everything, she's evil, she's seductive, she put thoughts in his empty head and now everything's ruined. He used to be so good and obedient before she came along.

Like... no, she loved him, she listened to him, she gave him grounding in reality. And now he's realised how awful you are and he's not gonna go along with it. She's not awful, they are.

Not to say this is definitely the royal situation but it is certainly giving me vibes 👀

[oberitsu]

actually i had a good point in those tags i think

be nuanced about where you use nuance

age gaps that AREN’T explicitly adults with children/young teens aren’t Inherently Bad, but red flags are usually red flags.

i.e. a 16 year old dating an 18 year old isn’t something to sound the alarms over automatically unless they give reason to, 14 year old with an 18 year old is Pretty Sketchy (stares at high school freshmen dating Hot Seniors), and someone like, 25+ dating a teenager is at best highly suspect (i mean if the teen is 18-19 you could make an argument) at worst something to make sure the teen is ok and get them to safety

[bellshazes]

ok I queued a little posts that aren't just walls of text and are nice art, I can't stop hearing raymaker by cheyenne Marie mize while percolating in all this + kingmaker bullshit (you've got a way got a way got a way of making me believe... the thread that unites all the people bdubs latches onto with complex loyalty) and I have my Monday call shortly which from the looks of it will be worldshakingly dramatic as it's been in like a month so. sorry not sorry etc email me never (literally inbox me even off anon I make friends by wordvomiting abt these things. It's fine I don't mind being enabled)

[silvermahogany]

Talking about a few songs I associate with my favourite aonoex characters bc i enjoy shoving my music taste in people's faces and analysing the shit out of nothing <3

Recent chapter spoiler warning lessgo, also mentions of suicide tw

THE MAIN MANS HIMSELF

Still feel - Half•Alive

"I am not a slave, so pick me from the dark and pull me from the grave"

In my mind, this is his themesong without a doubt. Its reached the point where wherever i hear it it makes me really happy because I associate it with him so strongly :,D might just be because I found it while getting back into the fandom when Ren was kinda transitioning to my favourite so they came up together but either way, absolute banger. The bit at the end when everything drops and the lead singer belts his heart out, I always love to picture Ren doing the same in the illuminati uniform with Yamatanka building around him and I've never wanted to learn how to animate more in my life cause my GOD he's so cool.

My favourite song for my favourite character <3

Preach - Saint Motel

"Oh im down on my knees, mercy"

Its so happy and bouncy?? And the vibes are immaculate?? Matches well with the themes of religion as well, this one definitely shows his flirty loverboy side more, it gives the impression of some lovestruck idiot stumbling over himself every time his crush does anything and honestly, sounds like something he'd do. Good song makes me go :))))

Your Love (Deja Vu) - Glass Animals

"You eat us up, you live like you're on camera"

I feel like this one captures his spy side a little more than the others. The lower notes in the main verses give a secretive feel, like he's halfway through a mission and trying trying stay silent. But it's also flirty in a more smooth way than wholesome crushes like the rest. The lead singer has such a gorgeous voice too i'll praise glass animals until the day i die 🥺🥺 God tier song god tier vibe 1000000/10

Do It All The Time - IDKHOWBUTTHEYFOUNDME

"Now we're so young but we're probably gonna die, it's so fun we're so good at selling lies"

Now THIS is a song for a spy working for a secret deadly organisation, all about world domination and having a great time doing it. Renzou is a free spirit and loves the freedom of his job, and this song really captures that for me. He knows he's in danger, but he's living his best life and he's having a great time doing it baybeeee B)))

Sweet Talk - Saint Motel

"You could yell 'piss off won't you stay away!' And still be sweet talk to my ears"

Ren is a persistent little shit when it comes comes crushes and this song shows it, a song about a guy who's so infatuated he doesn't care if he's hated or laughed at, he just loves hearing their voice. I see this as a bit of a yukishima anthem tbh, I feel like in the early stages of their relationship it would be pretty one sided with Shima trying to win him over and Yukio shutting him down so this matches that pretty well :>

Cant go five minutes without talking about them can i-

Honourable mentions-

Talk too much - COIN - very flirty and cheesy considered it as his themesong for a while

Toxic - Britney Spears - self explanatory :)

Razzmatazz - IDKHBTFM - everything they make shows his spy side imo, good for daydreaming

Van horn - Saint Motel -honestly anything by Saint Motel or Half•Alive reminds me of him, great bands :D

YUKIO MY BELOVED

Yukio was weirdly a lot harder for me to find songs for. For Renzou i have a giant playlist I add to over time, supreme comfort playlist egegegeheh, but Yukio's is a lot shorter for some reason. I guess his vibe is a little difficult to get down but a while scrolling through my main playlist and I think I have a decent few that at least match his character development and plotline.

Stressed Out - Twenty one Pilots

"Out of student loans and treehouse homes we all would take the latter"

Pretty self explanatory really, mans was forced to grow up and mature way faster than he shouldve had to, having a high stress job by the age of 13 studying for two meister all while studying to be a normal doctor as well. Not much of a surprise he has so many mental issues by the beginning of the story. I dont listen to much TOP but the few songs I know seem to fit Yukio pretty nicely :)

Oh Klahoma - Jack Stauber

"Those aren't meant to bend, no those arent meant to bend"

Another song based on depression, but with a much quieter feel, much lower energy. I feel like this one more links to his tendencies of delf destruction, and how alone he feels as he faces his battle. Like he's singing into the void hoping for something to reply, but nothing will. Man :(

The Fall - Half•Alive

"I'd jump off and into your arms but i cant trust the fall"

I feel like this one highlight his story to Rin in a really realistic way. Yukio has a good heart, he's kind and wants to love his brother and open up to him he wants to get better. But he's so deep in his pit of depression and conflicting feelings over his brother that he can't bring himself to, he sees no way out. God I wanna write an analysis on his character so bAD-

Baby Hotline - Jack Stauber

"Numb, I've been burning with haste and I'm realising now it's a terrible waste"

We just keep getting darker huh, didn't pick very pleasant tunes for this boy did I. A bouncy, happy song about a girl calling a suicide hotline, lovely. But i feel like it describes his mental state pretty well, outside he seems ok. Sure Rin picks up that somethings off, but once Yukio assures him he doesnt really persist above asking him a couple times. But below the facade he's really reaching his breaking point, and I love how this song contrasts those two tones in a scarily natural way. Absolute banger

Fireflies - Gorillaz

"And if you say goodbye too many times, the sentinels will find me and switch me off this time"

One of my absolute favourite Gorillaz songs by far. The melody is so gorgeous, melancholic in the best kind of way. For Yukio I feel like it signifies how trapped he feels as Satan's son, he's hit his lowest point and he doesnt know how to start moving back up. But the song also has a hopeful feel to it, as if even though he feels lost, he will get better. In the recent chapters we see a moment of reconciliation between Yukio and the people around him, with Suguro forgiving him and tye two brothers finally getting a chance to to things out. Before everything went to shit lmaoo. But with that i really hope that after all the fighting is done, Yukio will finally get the chance to see how bad things have gotten, and reach out to get better. And this song shows that for me :D

Honourable mentions!!

Creature - Half•Alive - the first song I ever added to his playlist, there for sentimentality tbh

Cane shuga - Glass Animals - the plonky noises make the happy chemical go buckwild, not sure why it reminds me of him it just kinda does really

I Earn My Life - Lemon Demon - mans is overworked give him a break :( ngl i don't associate it with him much but i wanted to edge a lemon demon song in somewhere-

Dead inside - Younger Hunger - whenever I hear this I always imagine a really cool animation of him and it always plays out the same way and MAN I wanna animate so baDD

Absolute wordvomit woohoo, hypervocused on this instead if doing the assignment due this evening I'm a fantastic student. This was kinda fun tho!!! I might do other characters at somepoint, these guys are my favourites but i have a bunch of playlists for other characters like Amaimon and Shura, recommendations are welcome too!!

[peoniarose]

bestieee can we see misfire, freddie, don't stop me now, and '39 for the queen asks?

What up @wordvomit-foryourmind !! Thank you for the asks~ Alrighty, lets get to it...

mistfire: do you want any kids? if so, how many

I really want kids. I would like a couple of kids. Three, maybe four. I am hoping for at least one boy and one girl. (I am hoping my future love person and I will have enough to support four children, if not then I am okay with less kids).

freddie: tell us about someone who has changed your life positively.

My best friend changed my life positively. She was the person who helped bring me out of my shell and be more out there. She is the Rachel to my Monica, the cherry to my coke, and my every sense of everything. I don’t know what I would do without her. I love her very much.

don’t stop me now: what’s your go-to happy song?

When I am feeling stressed or need to calm down I listen to the Pride and Prejudice soundtrack. It relaxes me immensely. Liz On Top of the World is my favorite track.

‘39: what are you afraid of?

I am afraid of being enclosed in. If I am not too into my head then I can handle huge crowds, but if I ever feel overly anxious or worried then I need to watch out. I am also afraid of being alone in the dark. There is something about the dark that makes my mind think of the creepiest things when I am alone in the dark.

queen-themed asks

[firelxdykatara]

I may or may not have inhaled almost all the Zutara and atla meta on your blog in *cough* a short amount of time. (#noregrets) I only realized atla was A Thing this year, so your blog is just content gold for *gestures* atla things. Oh! Question: What are your thoughts on ZukoxSokka? I'm in the Zutara OTP ship, but I don't hate Zukka. I guess I'm generally indifferent on that pairing.

EDIT: (bc i realize i didn’t address the first part of your ask at all) THANK YOU! i hope you enjoyed the meta bc I have. written A Lot Of It, some saltier than others, but at the end of the day I quite like validation and it’s nice to know people actually read and appreciate my metas!!!

As a ship, I actually don’t mind Zukka. They definitely look good together, and I can appreciate how a lot of their scenes in the Boiling Rock two-parter provided a lot of ship fodder, though they could never be my OTP because, as a ship and as a series-long relationship arc, Zukka just doesn’t have the range that Zutara does. They have two episodes for a cool jailbreak, and that’s........pretty much it. Zuko and Katara, meanwhile, have moments in episodes spanning all the way back to book one, they have all of the parallels and the symbolism, they have the Cave of Two Lovers story pretty explicitly mapping directly to their own journey, up to and including sharing a tender moment of connection in a cave with glowing green crystals, they have the fire/water and sun/moon associations, shared trauma and emotional support..... anyway. Yeah, for me, zukka is cute, but not in the same league.

However, I have the ship blacklisted and a fairly negative kneejerk reaction to seeing it, now, because of the shippers.

It wasn’t nearly so bad before the atla resurgence (when, I assume, the bitter klance fandom found proto-klance in Zukka and latched on hard--and, as someone who’s seen vld, I will say that Zukka is, by and large, what they wished Klance could have been), but even then some of the most prominent zukka shippers hopped on the ‘zutara is racist and if you ship it you’re racist’ train with absolutely zero self awareness, and that take became so hard to avoid that I just blacklisted the whole ship and washed my hands of it.

Which hasn’t stopped people from crosstagging, but there’s only so much you can do, you know?

I also don’t like how zukka shippers tend to dunk on Katara in service to their ship, and either forget Suki’s existence entirely or tack her onto zukka almost like an afterthought, especially since sukka is the only canon romance that was actually written and developed well across the series. And they’re usually perfectly happy to leave Katara with Aang and I’m not gonna go into all the problems I have with that here because I have this wordvomit problem and would never stop, but if you’ve been reading my metas then you know, and i just....idk it feels like they either don’t like Katara or just want to keep her out of the way and don’t care how badly she wound up being shafted in canon after atla’s timeline, and considering she’s my favorite character??? Yeah I don’t like that at all.

Anyway, at the end of the day, I have no problem with Zukka conceptually, though I do have a problem with the people who will insist that Zutara is problematic for -insert list of things that also apply to Zukka here-, and I don’t like how Katara and often Suki are typically treated in those narratives, so I have the ship’s tags blacklisted and have had a happier fandom experience because of it.

[synthient]

Could you elaborate on what you mean about Death T re stanning and fairness? It sounds interesting and I'd love to hear about it if you don't mind sharing.

ajhfakj hoo boy. Okay.

So some time around the summer before last (judging by the point where the first baffled and frustrated readmores start showing up on this blog), I read Death-T. It made me feel…some kind of way. An…unpleasant kind of way.

Here’s the thing about me: I can’t just let myself have an emotional reaction to a piece of fiction. I have to, first, pick apart my own emotions to figure out why I had that reaction, and second, pick apart the story to figure out how it works and how it made me feel that way.

On the Feelings Front, I’ve isolated two main causes:

1. I have a brain that Needs Things To Be Fair. That doesn’t mean I can’t handle unfairness in a piece of fiction. Unfairness creates conflict, and conflict is what makes for good storytelling. But it does mean that I need the story to be aware of its own unfairness. I need the unfairness to be the point. Otherwise I start vibrating at high speeds and shaking my fist at clouds.

2. I’m a Kaiba stan. I accidentally got emotionally attached to the Funny Card Game Boy from the Funny Card Game Show. 

There’s the feelings part. That leaves the “picking apart the story” side of the equation. And I’ve been trying to do that in nice punchy little one-or-two-paragraph text posts for the past year or so, but I don’t think I’ve ever really done the argument justice that way. So I guess that leaves only one option: writing a giant wordvomit essay on Yugioh (1996-2004).

Why This Is A Death-T Hateblog: The Masterpost

An important note: I like being able to back up my thoughts with Evidence From The Text, but I’m specifically working off the (Viz translated) manga. You can read Cards with Teeth here, Capumon here, and Death-T starting here if you want to check any of my facts or draw your own conclusions. Keep in mind that the Toei anime made pretty huge changes to the s0 Kaiba storyline, and the DM anime skipped most of it entirely–if you’re more familiar with those continuities, there’re some major differences in the manga.

(Also this thing probably reads better on desktop. I think the formatting got screwed up on mobile)

How We Got Here

Before we can actually dig into Death-T, we need to start at the very beginning (♫a very good place to start♫). So that means taking a look at “The Cards with Teeth (Part 1)” and “The Cards with Teeth (Part 2).”

For its first 8 chapters, the Yugioh manga chugs blissfully (if repetitively) along with an episodic, conflict-of-the-week formula. No overarching plot. Next to no sense of continuity. No trading cards in sight.

Then this asshole shows up. 

His name is Seto Kaiba (or “Kaiba,” at least–not sure if this is just a Viz thing, but my copy of CwT never mentions his given name). Not that he bears a whole lot of resemblance to the Seto Kaiba we later come to know and love (and/or love to hate).

Almost none of his most defining traits are there yet. There’s no mention of Mokuba, no mention of Kaibacorp, no indicationthat he’s especially rich (besides the fact that he’s carrying around a wholebriefcase of trading cards), no reason to believe he has a specific obsession with Blue Eyes (he just thinks it’s a strong card and it’d help him win tournaments), and no sign of any special hacking/strategy/hand-to-hand-combat/etc. skills (the kid is hilariously incompetent). 

This dude was never supposed to be a recurring character, and it shows.

But anyway, let’s run through the basic series of events:

- Kaiba wanders into the game shop looking forbooster packs. Yugi recognizes him as an acquaintance from school (not as a famous kid CEO, and not as a recent transfer student)

- Kaiba happens to notice the Blue Eyes card lying out onGrandpa’s counter (in this version of events, he hasn’t been stealing rare cards for months before this, he didn’t creep on Yugi’s conversation and followhim home, he had no idea going in that the Blue Eyes was there, and he didn’t already have the other three)

- He offers to trade all the cards in his briefcasefor the Blue Eyes (although he doesn’t tell Grandpa to name his price—again,the millionaire CEO element isn’t a thing yet)

- Grandpa refuses, so the next day Kaiba comes up with alaughably badly thought-out plan to steal the card

- Shockingly, Yugi notices that the “color copy from the catalog” isn’t the real deal. He gently tries to confront Kaiba about it in private

- Kaiba (without showing an ounce of the cool head you’d think you’d need to take over and run a company) panics, starts stammering and unconvincingly denying it, and then smacks Yugi with his briefcase

Annnd then Part 2 plays out like a standard s0 chapter.

“Yami Yugi” takes over. They play a shadow game. Kaiba cheats by slipping the stolen Blue Eyes out of his sleeve (Atem’s like “That’s my Grandpa’s card!” and Kaiba straight up goes “Whaaat, nooo, that’s my card that I, uh, found on the street just now.” A teen genius criminal mastermind, everybody). The shadow magic gives him a spritz from its metaphorical Karmic Cat-Training Spray Bottle and makes his Blue Eyes dissolve (I’d like to think that was Kisara going “I’m not mad, just disappointed,” and Memory World tries to retroactively make that connection, but it’s pretty abundantly clear that nothing about this series was planned that far ahead). He loses. Yadda yadda yadda.

And then Atem goes in for the penalty game.

To recap: 

Some random 10th grader from Yugi’s school stole a trading card, hit someone, and was generally kind of a jerk. As punishment, he was trapped in a hyper-realistic illusion of being ripped apart and slaughtered by half a dozen monsters at once.

Y…ay…?

Let’s Stop and Reflect for a Sec

In theory, I shouldn’t be that much more upset about Cards with Teeth than I am about any other part of s0, right? It’s not like the manga framed it as horrific and wrong when Atem set off an explosion in some teenage bully’s face a couple chapters ago. Giving us the vicarious pleasure of punishing our bullies in over-the-top, Carrie-style ways without actually exploring any of the consequences is, like, the early manga’s whole thing.

But even taking into account the fact that I already had an attachment to this Nasty Bowl Cut Boy thanks to the anime, I do actually think that there are at least two factors that set CwT apart.

The first is that Atem’s karmic punishments are usually…well, karmic. If he inflicts physical harm on someone, it’s because they already inflicted or tried to inflict roughly the same amount of harm on Yugi & co. If the crime was relatively minor, then he only gives out a minor punishment–like, say, when the homeroom teacher was Just Kinda Mean, all he did was allow the class to see her without her makeup on (…setting aside the Let’s Get Into Gender Politics-ness of that chapter).

There’s even a few cases where you could argue that the punishment is too light to fit the crime. Ushio beat Jonouchi and Honda half to death and tried to murder Yugi with a knife, and all he got was this lousy t-shirt an illusion that made the trash on the ground look like money.

In another chapter, the villain of the week tried to rape Anzu, and the only punishment he faced was having his side business exposed as a scam (Let’s Get Into Gender Politics).

Yet in CwT, we see one of the most harmless villains in all of s0 (no prolonged beatings or attempted murder? unheard of!) receive what’s arguably the most horrifying penalty game in the whole manga. At least when that guy got set on fire, it was over fast.

And that brings us to factor number two: Kaiba is the first penalty game victim in s0 who comes back. 

Capumon: Gotta Catch ‘em All!

Well, technically he doesn’t come back in person, at first. Someone else shows up to fight in his name.

Oh hey Mokie. How’s it going?

Rather understandably (imo), Mokuba wants the guy who tortured his brother last week to face some actual consequences for it.

Now here’s an interesting opportunity that the manga has set up for itself. Is it going to dig deep into the balance between defending yourself vs lashing out and causing undue harm? Is it going to remind us that most of the penalty game victims so far, whatever their crimes,have been children? Is it going to demonstrate that when you take out your anger on someone, you don’t just hurt your immediate target, but their loved ones as well?

Nah, who am I kidding.  

Hurting or inconveniencing the Good Guys in any way is Bad. Anything the Good Guys do is Good and Justified. Using magic to stick an already-hurting eleven-year-old in his own personalized hell? Good and Justified.

Before he’s shoved screaming into the Giant Vending Machine Capsule Where Bad And Naughty Elementary Schoolers Go To Atone For Their Crimes, Mokuba mentions that the other penalty game he heard about “made my brother go crazy!”

He also drops a hint of things to come with all the subtlety of an anvil. So I guess by this point, the numbers had come in and the card game chapter had proved unexpectedly popular enough that a sequel was in the works.

Death-Twink? Death-Tastic?Death-Two: Electric Boogaloo?

I’ve been pretty hard on Cards with Teeth and Capsule Monsters Chess so far. But you want to know the truth?

On their own, they aren’t necessarily that bad.

What really matters in a story isn’t the literal events: it’s how those events are framed. At the moment, we’re only midway through an incomplete storyline. Maybe we’re supposed to be horrified. Maybe we’re supposed to be questioning whether or not the hero is really in the right. It all hangs on what these chapters are building to.

As it turns out–as Mokuba just helpfully clued us in on–they were building to Death-T.

And that’s where the shit hits the fan.

Over a dozen chapters after we first met Kaiba, a whole bunch of completely-unforeshadowed facts about him are suddenly dumped on us all at once. He’s rich! The kind of rich that allows for limo rides, a giant mansion, and flouncing around in a fur-lined cape like feudal European nobility! And he’s the president of a company, even though “Whaa?!! But he’s still in high school!” Speaking of which, apparently Kaiba “hasn’t been at school recently.”

The Death-T arc opens with Yugi and Jonouchi attending the world’s most awkward sleepover–the host never shows up, and they don’t even get to paint each others’ nails or watch movies. Also Mokuba tries to murder them in the night, but you know what? If someone tortured my brother, “made him go crazy,” and left him huddled in the house feverishly working on a bizarre project and refusing to go to school for the next few weeks, I’d probably poison them too.

The morning after the sleepover, we learn another new Kaiba Fact…

Ever since the Experience of Death happened, he’s been having horrible recurring PTSD nightmares about it. As you do. When you get tortured.

(This is why, even though I know intellectually that it’s Not That Deep and people arejust having fun, I still get a little skeeved out when I see jokes about howDeath-T happened “just” because Kaiba was that mad about losing a card game or “just”because he had a crush on Yugi and he didn’t know how to deal with it. I’malways internally like “Nnno, I’m pretty sure it was the torture?”)

So far we’ve been shown in pretty brutal detail that our “hero” psychologically broke a fifteen-year-old for no good reason. The manga’s going to have its work cut out for it if it really wants to do a convincing redemption arc for its protagonist. And there’s no way it could possibly try to spin that random act of torture as an acceptable thing, right?

…right?

Crime and Punishment

That’s one of my first big problems with Death-T: to me, it reads as a way of trying to retroactively justify the Experience of Death.

That seems to be the purpose of suddenly giving Kaiba all this wealth and power that was never hinted at in Cards with Teeth. See, he wasn’t just some random high school kid who had the bad luck of crossing someone with magic powers; he was (however improbable that is, as the story lampshades) a high school-aged CEO. He’s so ludicrously powerful that he can torture an old man in front of a live audience and get away with it. Punching up looks a lot better than punching down, doesn’t it?

And you can’t really fault the hero for torturing someone evil, can you? Kaiba used Grandpa’s sanity as a blackmail chip! He ran experiments on human test subjects! He wants to kill Yugi and everyone he loves! Surely a little torture is no worse than he deserved.

There’s only one one problem with that: the Experience of Death happened before Death-T. There’s no way Atem could have known any of this was coming. The audience couldn’t have known it was coming. Takahashi didn’t know. Chronologically speaking, the Experience of Death wasn’t revenge for Death-T. It’s the other way around.

Best Served Cold

So Death-T is a form of eye-for-an-eye vengeance: “Yugi” beat Kaiba at Duel Monsters and tortured him, so now Kaiba’s gonna beat Yugi and torture him, using his own perfect virtual recreation of “Yugi’s” penalty game (oh yeah, that whole “the average person goes insane in about 10 minutes” thing? Kaiba was able to program that detail from personal experience).

But wait! This isn’t really eye-for-an-eye! Kaiba’s going after Yugi’s loved ones, not just Yugi, and that’s worse than what Yugi did to him! And even if it was proportionate, revenge is bad and wrong. That’s how you get endless back-and-forth chains of vengeance and generational blood feuds and stuff. Two wrongs don’t make a right!

And those could all be reasonable points, except…

This entire story is about how great and badass eye-for-an-eye justice is.

“Wouldn’t it be cool if you could take everyone who ever hurt you and make them suffer even worse” is practically the thesis of Season 0. You can’t make something look awesome when the protagonist does it and then turn around and make it seem evil and inexcusable coming from anyone else.

And while Kaiba does wind up targeting Yugi’s friends, that wasn’t part of his original plan. He’s surprised when random people start jumping out of the bleachers/the Kaibacorp employee roster and insisting that they won’t let Yugi do this alone. The writing uses his surprise as proof that he just doesn’t understand The Power of Friendship, but it’s also evidence that his original target was just Yugi.

“If you’re gonna side with my torturer, then you can have the same fate as him, I guess.” It’s not even that far outside the logic Atem’s been using all this time. Just because there’s only one main gang member who personally hurt his friend, that doesn’t mean that Atem won’t rope every random mook who gets in his way into the death game too. (Granted, this doesn’t really apply to Kaiba’s treatment of Grandpa. Or the offscreen experimentation/blackmailing. Or Mokuba, but…we’ll get to that).

…But like I said before, the big issue isn’t the events. It’s the framing. Maybe the point will ultimately be that if penalty games are wrong when the bad guy does them, then they’re wrong when the hero does them too. Maybe this is all leading up to a big reexamination of Atem’s moral code and some much-needed character development.

Maybe. Let’s keep going and see.

*Great Gatsby comic voice* Baby? What Baby

Death-T runs for 14 chapters, but Kaiba isn’t actually there for, like…half of them.

I mean, he’s technically there? Occasionally? He’ll show up long enough to dramatically play chess for a panel or so, or to stick his head on a TV monitor and provide some Helpful Death Game Hints. But for all practical purposes, he’s pretty much absent for the entire middle section of the story arc.

And, uh…let’s just say I 100% understand and respect the DM anime’s decisionto go straight from Grandpa’s heart attack to the final duel and skipeverything in between.

If Kaiba’s real goal is to beat Yugi at Duel Monsters, then all the death games leading up to that one are basically filler. And they manage to be just as contrived and nonsensical as any anime filler arc, without a fraction of the fun.

It’s largely a tonal issue. The writing swings wildly between grimdark dramatics, sentimental conversations about friendship where everyone hugs and cries (tbh that’s one of the few redeeming qualities of the arc), and “comic relief” where the “““comedy””” is all either bodily function jokes or sexual assault jokes (L̠̤̯͍̦e̮̪͎̞t's̞̮̳̱̰̦̲ ̲G͖͉̹̻̯͉͖e̜̝̗͓̟͚t̖͚ ͚̰̞̮̝̫͎I͓̜̦̳̭͚͎n̪̪͈t͍̥̰̼o͚͎͇̣̘̝ ̪̼̜̣̳G͈̠̫e̳̝̗̪ṋ͚̞͎ͅd͔̙͓̯̹e̯̺̯̩r͔̣̲͔̳̗ ̘͙P̖̦o̩̺͖͎̞̬l͎̺͕̹i͇̣̼̦t̰i̬̰̝͙̗̝c̜̼̺̪̲̞s).

Honestly, in terms of the “stanning and fairness” argument, there’s not much to talk about here. It just adds insult to injury that not only does Death-T throw my fave under the bus, but it’s really badly written.

The Mokuba Thing

Okay, let’s fast-forward through the filler zone and stoppp…here. 

In the context of the anime, where we know (and see multiple flashbacks demonstrating) that their whole life has been an “us against the world” story, this scene is tragic. Seto’s trust in people has been eroded so much that he even thinks Mokuba is conspiring against him? Their love and support for each other, which has survived through so much hardship, has finally cracked under the weight of this latest trauma? There’s a lot of dramatic and tearjerking potential there.

I think it’s pretty safe to say that most of us bring our baggage from the anime with us when we read the manga. The vast majority of the western Yugioh fandom did start with DM. 

But if we look at this purely in the context of the manga–if we can pretend, for a second, that none of us have ever heard of the anime–this is the first time we see the two of them interacting onscreen. And none of those touching flashbacks of Seto comforting Mokuba and defending him from bullies and promising to be his father exist here. All we ever really learn about their relationship before this point is “They used to be a little closer when they were younger. Source: one (1) photo of them playing chess.”

So instead of serving as the tragic lowpoint of their relationship, this scene sets the baseline for it: Mokuba desperately wants to make his brother happy and earn his approval, while Seto responds with dismissal and cruelty.

In the anime (and to a certain extent in the later manga), Mokuba’s purpose in the narrative is to humanize Seto. But in Death-T, he serves the opposite function. Every interaction they have is an opportunity for Seto to kick the dog and prove what a monster he is.

And it’s all downhill from here.

………………

…So.

I have…mixed feelings about this.

On one level–a meta level–I think this scene serves the same purpose as taking that random high schooler from CwT and suddenly giving him ridiculous amounts of money and power and mustache-twirling levels of villainy. It’s a way of making the Experience of Death seem retroactively justified (and also a way of making the upcoming penalty game look fair).

On the other hand. It’s. 

Horrific.

This scene is supposed to make us hate Kaiba, and it does it’s job really really well.

Personally speaking? I’m of the opinion that trying to hurt the child under your care as badly as you conceivably can is a “don’t pass go, don’t collect $100″ kind of deal. There’s no coming back from that. There’s no fixing or salvaging this relationship.  

(God, this whole thing is wrapped in so many layers of fantasy that I’m not even sure what the real-world equivalent would be. Trying to beat your child not quite to death?)

Mokuba should not have had to continue living with his brother after this, any more than the Ishtars should have had to stay with their dad or Seto should have had to stay with Gozaburo. Mokuba forgiving Seto for this isn’t touching to me, it’s gut-wrenching. Every “heartwarming” brotherly moment in the later manga (all, like…2 and a half of them) feels hollow and sad.

As far as I’m concerned, this scene doesn’t “complicate” their relationship in any interesting or meaningful way. Their anime relationship already has plenty of complications–their sometimes unhealthy co-dependence, the fact that Seto is still a kid himself and he’s not really equipped to be a parent,Mokuba’s difficulty understanding that Seto can’t just “go back to who he was” before his trauma, the times when Seto is too caught up in his own pain to really be there for Mokuba, the manipulation involved in Seto’s takeover plan, etc. This just makes their relationship outright child abuse.

But hey, they hugged that one time in Duelist Kingdom, so it’s fine, right?

ExODiA iiiIIIIT’s not pAHsible

The final duel happens. The big Blue Eyes vs Exodia showdown.

*Bill Wurtz voice* So that’s pretty nifty, I would say.

It’s..? A genuinely cool and dramatic duel. There’s a reason it’s one of the, like, three Death-T elements the DM anime actually bothered to keep. Not much to say about it.

Sure was a whole lot of buildup just to end things with one (1) deus ex machina instawin card, tho.

The Tragic Backstory

So if all this happened because of a penalty game, what do you think the solution could be?

Did you say “another, even harsher penalty game”?

Ding ding ding!

This time, instead of torturing the fifteen-year-old, our hero puts the fifteen-year-old in a vegetative state as he begs for mercy.

Yaaaayy! 

Some fun facts about the Mind Crush that we don’t actually learn until Duelist Kingdom:

1. It lasted for 6 months

2. Mokuba spent that entire time alone, in the big empty mansion, with no parental guidance or adult supervision except the butlers and maids, caring for his brother’s comatose body 24/7

3. When Atem put Kaiba in that coma, he had absolutely no idea if he’d ever be able to wake up or not. He thought he could, maybe–Kaiba’s pretty strong, right? But he also finds the idea that Kaiba died in his coma and came back to haunt him perfectly believable. “Fixed,” dead…eh, it was kind of a coin toss.

But wait, the story’s not over yet! First we have to find out Why Kaiba Is The Way He Is (“Because your buddy tortured him last month” isn’t enough of an answer, apparently).

This is communicated in the most natural way possible: Mokuba just starts monologuing about all his brother’s deepest darkest traumas to a bunch of strangers his brother hates.

The claim that Kaiba’s backstory is “more complex” in the manga than it is in the anime has always confused me, because this is…it. These three pages are the whole backstory. I mean, in Battle City we do get one more passing line of dialog about how Kaibacorp used to be a weapons manufacturer and Gozaburo “sold Seto’s soul to the military industrial complex,” but other than that… The anime took these bare bones and fleshed them out significantly, but from a pure manga canon standpoint, it’s not a whole lot to work with.

But there’s still enough here to rub me the wrong way.

For one thing, this sequence is almost an exact parallel to two later moments in the manga: Pegasus’s backstory dump at the end of Duelist Kingdom, and Malik’s backstory dump mid-Battle City. In both of those cases, the purpose of the scene is to take a villain whose motives seemed cruel and inexplicable and finally reveal the reasons behind his actions. We’re supposed to be seeing these characters in a sympathetic light for the very first time.

But Kaiba’s motives in Death-T, uh, weren’t exactly a mystery. He already made it pretty explicitly clear that this was about the torture. So as a narrative tool, Mokuba’s monologue:

1. seems a little superfluous

2. seems like a way of taking any responsibility out of the protagonist’s hands. Kaiba didn’t snap because of anything Atem did, he just had a bunch of fucked up baggage that Atem couldn’t possibly have known about or accounted for. Who knew some people take it badly when you torture them??

3. seems to suggest that we weren’t supposed to be sympathizing with Kaiba before this point. If this is the big “oh, now that I know why he did it, I guess I feel a little bad for him :(” moment, then that means the part where he got tortured…wasn’t?

And, as always, there’s the issue of the framing.

The grace note of the monologue–the thought it leaves us with, the intended takeaway–isn’t “If only he hadn’t gone through years of abuse, in circumstances he had no real control over because he was a child.” It’s “If only he hadn’t brought all this upon himself by cheating.”

Even if we ignore the fact that it’s physically impossible to cheat at chess (which seems like kind of a big oversight for a gaming manga, but oh well, That’s Yugioh Babe)…

How can you possibly present a ten-year-old cheating at a board game in a desperate gambit to get himself and his brother out of an orphanage as his start of darkness?

Yet that’s exactly what the writing does. This is a story about how games “reveal the true hearts” of their players and bring karmic retribution down on anyone who doesn’t respect the game and follow the rules. The implication is that the child abuse Seto suffered was karma. He rightfully earned it by cheating at chess, just like he brought the Experience of Death upon himself by cheating at Duel Monsters.

Oh yeah, speaking of which…

Wheel of Morality, Turn Turn Turn, Tell Us The Lesson We Should Learn

What was the outcome of Death-T? What impact did it actually have? 

Did it bring about any big moral reckoning? Any questioning of the heroes’ values? Did Atem learn the difficult but important lesson “torture bad”?

Nnnnope!

Death-T is immediately followed by a series of episodic chapters that take us right back to the status quo like nothing happened. Atem keeps merrily handing out penalty games all the way up to the very end of Duelist Kingdom. When he does finally stop doing them, his decision has nothing to do with Death-T. It takes a comment from Pegasus about the Millennium Items having an “evil intelligence” to make him wonder “wait…I’m from a Millennium Item…I’m an intelligence…could evil…maybe include…torture????”

And even after the manga lukewarmly reverses its position to “torture sort of bad I guess,” it never really does anything with that revelation. None of the past penalty games are ever reexamined. No apologies are made. The Experience of Death is quietly swept under the rug, and the Mind Crush, when it’s brought up at all, is framed as noble act that “fixed” Kaiba (because “if you make someone suffer badly enough, you can hurt them into being a better person” is a great message).

Basically, we learned nothing from Death-T, nothing changed, and our takeaway is supposed to be “Atem was 100% in the right and Kaiba was 100% in the wrong, and also he’s an evil monster who deserved everything he got.”

Guess I Need A Satisfying Conclusion of Some Kind Even Through Death-T Didn’t Really Have One, Huh

Wow.

That was…a whole lot of words of Death-T rage that I apparently had in me zjkghzkkf. 

I tend to feel less justified about constantly harping on Death-T then I do when it comes to, like, the racism in Memory World, or the series’ general Miss O’Gyny. It’s not like “magical vigilantism” is exactly a real-word social issue that’s being reflected in this piece of fiction. I realize a lot of my anger pretty much boils down to “hey,, ! thats…my fave. stopp...being mean to him >:(”

But I also feel like the issues in Death-T aren’t limited to Death-T.

The manga has this…this thing where it wants to be able to pinpoint a few clear, unchanging moral rules (“cheating is bad!” “graverobbing is bad!” “patricide is bad!”) and just apply them neatly to every situation, without having to take into account any of that inconvenient stuff like “what were the circumstances of this specific situation,” or “how many choices were actually open to this person,” or “how much harm was done by this choice compared to its benefits in terms of basic human well-being.” Yet at the same time, that moral absolutism is somehow coupled with a reluctance to apply any moral judgement to its protagonists at all. 

The two points where that becomes clearest are Death-T and Memory World. And I feel like even when people acknowledge the issues with those arcs, they still want to be able to write it off as “oh, that was just a problem with the early chapters, it was fixed as the writing matured,” or “oh, that was just a problem at the end because of the mad rush to finish the story before it got canceled, it was never a thing before then.” But it’s not an isolated problem. It’s there at the beginning of the story, it’s there at the end, and it’s baked into everything in the middle.

…but anyhow. 

hey,, ! thats…my fave. stopp...being mean to him >:(

[loghainmactir]

hewwo! i was wondering if u could pls give me some advice on starting my transition? ive been so scared to start bc of family and costs but ive decided to just. do it. yknow? like if i don't ill probably die lol. u look amazing and rly confident in yourself in all ur selfies and one day i wanna be Like That ✌️❤️

hi! ok, so first of all: yeah, i absolutely can give u advice, and second of all: i remember feeling exactly like you did. it literally wasn’t that long ago, either, it was like. 2013/14/15 (i can’t remember, time is fake, whatever lmao!). third of all: bless u yr so sweet. i still have a lotta issues with confidence (i doubt myself, my talent and what i can do literally hourly), but honestly? i love my body right now. it’s a good, genderless body, goddamnit.

long, long post ahead bc i’m trying to think of things i did and good god please take it with a grain of salt because a lot of this is just me ranting about things i wish I’D done in my own position. i’m also coming from a place where HRT and surgeries AREN’T free, so that’s also A Thing. everyone’s experience is different.

transitioning (particularly medically) really super fuckin varies country by country (and honestly probably even state by state, age by age and fuckin gender by gender because cis people won’t let us fucking BE goddamn): i don’t know where you are, so my only tips there r: find a trans friendly doctor/endo (i was kinda forced to go through a hospital bc That Was How It Was here in good ol’ Australia), and one people wholeheartedly recommend, if you wanna go that route.

my first point is make sure you find safe spaces in every goddamn aspect of your transition. medically, socially, physically. if you think your doctor is refusing you treatment or is discriminating against you, you NEED to ditch that doctor. if your friends and family are really verbally or physically violent against LGBT folks, you NEED to leave that space if you can (or not come out and wait until you can leave. seriously. i’m kinda lucky– my grandma was verbally violent against LGBT folks, and initially my mum was skepitcal, but i convinced them both to go to a group for LGBT+ parents and friends and they slowly turned around). get yourself friends, get yourself allies.

i cannot stress that enough. my first doctor refused to send my referral letter to the royal children’s hospital gender clinic because even tho he presented as a “nice” guy, he believed that because this was “”””out of the blue”””” for me, he figured he’d just Not Send It (and tried to tell me that a lotta kids there didn’t actually helpo, lol). so there i was, a young 15-16 year old alister, waiting like 2-3 months for something that didn’t even get fucking sent.

join trans groups on facebook and in real life. seriously, they’re a godsend; there’s buy-and-sells, advice posts, encouragement posts. ESPECIALLY local ones. most of them on facebook are private, meaning no one can see if you’re posting/in the group, and it’s easy to check if they’re not. these fb pages + local groups are good ways to find trans friendly spaces and doctors. i found my current doctor, who’s actually one of the very few doctors who knows what the fuck he’s on about re: trans people, through a real life trans group. they were like “oh, you should see x”, and even though he’s about 30-40 minutes away from me, he’s brilliant and honestly saved my life.

along those lines: figure out what you want from your transition, and then realize & accept that this may change (and it also may not change!). very early on, i was super insistent that i wanted phalloplasty and to wear packers, and now i couldn’t care less. at first, i identified as agender, and then as a trans guy/ftm, and now i identify as a Black Hole (i’m kidding, don’t @ me). like, a lotta people DON’T change their minds. but i did, some people do, and it shouldn’t be anyone’s business but your own what you want to do with your body 

(sidenote: this also goes for detransitioning or stopping medical transition but continuing to socially transition/present differently. literally, it’s fine. it’s your body. fuck anyone who says otherwise.)

again: FUCK ANYONE WHO SAYS OTHERWISE.

your body is literally your body. do NOT let anyone tell you what to do with it or who you are. i had people very early on scream at me (legitimately scream and throw me out of home, thanks grandma), tell me i wasn’t actually trans, and harrass me for this shit: but frankly, if i’d put myself back in the closet, i wouldn’t be alive right now. i would’ve killed myself years ago, and i wish i wasn’t kidding. if it’s safe, you need to stand up for your own body and your rights and put yourself somewhere that will allow you to follow through. you need to keep going and keep living.

my only other two pieces of advice are “patience, baby”– like, for real, every single part of transition takes time. this varies from where you are and who’s supporting you, but it’s generally true. it takes time for people to accept new names and pronouns 

(lotta people get furious about this, and i used to be one of those people, but hindsight’s a bitch and you gotta realize that… like, it’s hard for some cis people. you gotta give them a little bit of wiggle room, especially if they’ve never ever met a trans person before. it’s about reminders, reminders, reminders: which is SO hard if you’re not safe/don’t have the confidence. there IS a flip side to this though: if chad and stacey have known your new pronouns for months, now, and they keep “””slipping””” up, they’re not slipping up, honey. they’re doing it on purpose. kick their teeth in i’m kidding please don’t do this you know what i mean.)

it takes time for HRT to kick in. it takes time to gather a Look™ of your own you like, it takes time to build confidence to even tell people, it takes time to save up money for surgeries and it just… takes time. sometimes because it’s a naturally slow process, sometimes because cis people are Cis People and like to gatekeep. i remember being very young in my transition, sitting in the car after one of my appointments with the afformentioned shithead doctor bawling my eyes out because he’d told me i wouldn’t be able to access t for x amount of time and it was bullshit. this year i’ll be 2 years on t. wild, huh? there’s a lot of us and not equal amounts of resources (ESPECIALLY in public systems) depending on where you are, so you gotta be prepared to WAIT.

i’ll tell you what super helped me through those years: hyping myself up for other things! i still have the ticket from my first twenty one pilots show. that show meant SO much to me. i cried all through it, because waiting for that show kept my mind off of the wait for my royal children’s appointments (and even waiting to go up to melbourne bc my mum and i would go and get kebabs was a good thing to focus on!). keep things that aren’t trans related on hand (seriously i struggled with this because dysphoria and shit is fucking hard!! it’s easy to say but really fucking hard to put into practice).

(one day i’m gonna tell tyler and josh just how much they saved my goddamn life. i know they hear it weekly, but i will.)

my other thing is that uh. it won’t solve all your problems especially if you’ve got mental illnesses. this is a really fuckin depressing thing i had to drill into my brain, but it really helped. transitioning solved SO many of my issues. i no longer have back issues (thanks, like, literal kilo titties, lmao), i no longer have sore ribs and i can breathe and wear shirts. i lost so much weight (and am kinda gaining it back, but whatever). i no longer have anxiety about whether people can tell i’m binding– which is WILD because i used to stress the fuck out about it to the point where i never went out anywhere. i used to sit on the bus wondering if the person next to me could tell i had titties. now it literally doesn’t even register.

my issues now stem from PTSD, depression, BPD and ADHD. how do you fix this? you don’t. but what HAS helped is finding a therapist who won’t pressure you into talking about trans shit. lemme tell you: this shit gets exhausting after the fifth time of “oh i googled ‘can you become a boy’ when i was, like, nine” (this is my go to story because this memory is so vivid). of course, there’s gonna be moments where you HAVE to: my therapist recently actively asked me to briefly run through it for my PTSD report. but otherwise we literally haven’t talked about it and that is a GODSEND (because i don’t need it. if you need it, that’s good, too!). having a therapist that you can just wordvomit at wrt anything is literally the best thing and can be super helpful– seriously, there were a few trans-related sessions where i just snarled about the bullshit gatekeeping and the bastard i had to see for my therapist letter (oooh, every time i think abt the fact that it was something like $400-500 for two fucking sessions i get so mad lol), but outta 14 it’s really only like 2-3 of them.

but yeah. that’s it. i dunno, these are things that i’ve learnt and sorta… like to think as helpful for myself. of course, this could be different for you: you’re not me, you’re entirely different, in no doubt an entirely different country, social, financial, mental state. i was FUCKED UP when i first came out. i didn’t know that then, but i do now. i spent a lotta time by myself and that’s not healthy, so i really encourage you to reach out to our community, local and worldly, because oh my god, we’re here for you. we are SO here for you.